gardens.

The products are manifold--guavas, mangoes, lemons, oranges, bananas,
plantains, shaddocks, bread-fruit, etc.; and sugar, rice, sweet
potatoes, ginger, areca, and cocoa-nuts, coffee, cloves, some nutmegs,
and black and white pepper. My gharrie driver took me to see a Chinese
pepper plantation--to me the most interesting thing that I saw on a
very long and hot drive. Pepper is a very profitable crop. The vine
begins to bear in three or four years after the cuttings have been
planted, and yields two crops annually for about thirteen years. It is
an East Indian plant, rather pretty, but of rambling and untidy growth,
a climber, with smooth, soft stems, ten or twelve feet long, and tough,
broadly ovate leaves. It is supported much as hops are. When the
berries on a spike begin to turn red they are gathered, as they lose
pungency if they are allowed to ripen. They are placed on mats, and are
either trodden with the feet or rubbed by the hands to separate them
from the spike, after which they are cleaned by winnowing. Black pepper
consists of such berries wrinkled and blackened in the process of
drying, and white pepper of similar berries freed from the skin and the
fleshy part of the fruit by being soaked in water and then rubbed. Some
planters bleach with chlorine to improve the appearance; but this
process, as may be supposed, does not improve the flavor.

In these climates the natives use enormous quantities of pepper, as
they do of all hot condiments, and the Europeans imitate them.

Although there are so many plantations, a great part of Pinang is
uncleared, and from the peak most of it looks like a forest. It
contains ninety thousand inhabitants, the Chinese more than equaling
all the other nationalities put together. Its trade, which in 1860 was